Your wallet was always open for others. You spent as if you were a king with a bottomless treasury. You splurged on your friends. Any spare cash, after the burst of spending elsewhere, was needed for the daily bottle of rum, for cigarettes, for the paan and tobacco you chewed, and we could not possibly save that money. The smoking only lasted a few years – your wife had bronchitis and we girls were coughing too, so you threw that last cigarette away with a flourish. But there was no time to celebrate, for the drink and chewing tobacco would increase to compensate.
You would die without the intoxicants, you said.
You will die because of them, I repeatedly told you. We were both right.
You started to enjoy your drink when we were living in Goa, when you were in your early thirties. I had just started going to school, and G was a cranky little toddler who clung to our mother and cried for hours for reasons we could not guess. Your responsibilities must have appeared unending – two young daughters, the dreary routine of long hours in paperwork and no outlets for the quirky passions that were so distinct to you. Surely this must be when it first sunk in – a formulaic life stretching out in endless vistas.
Loneliness is never easy to discern with the gregarious ones, although it probably morphs into a camouflaged swamp, just beneath the laughter and talk. You were never without company. And, always at home with children, you never skimped on your love for us – it was demonstrative, effusive, joyous. You laughed, you played, you told us stories.
The happiness of each rising crest seemed to extract from us corresponding ebbs. When you were at your charismatic best, you were unsurpassable, but then the waning, the tempestuous phases would be upon us.
Imperfections of certain kinds niggled at you.
I was ahead of the children in my class in reading and the teacher had not thought my maths needed improving, but I was not particularly good with numbers. You adored numbers, and this was the first sign that I might disappoint, not be the inheritor of your many gifts.
At the kitchen table, you sat with me. I had just been handed a narrow notebook of multiplication tables designed like a telephone diary, with tabs and grooves, handmade with flesh pink and verdant green pages. It was stapled together, my full name on the cover page, and all the numbers written by you with a blue roller pen. I was six or seven, and I knew from the way you gave it to me that night at the kitchen table that it was a labour of pure love, infused with all the hope you had in me. I still have the little book. It is in tatters, and it represents pain.
The delicate pink and green pages fluttered in my little hands, my head swimming from the stack of numbers. My mind refused to absorb or retain the natural beauty and logic of numbers that you always enjoyed. Let me be, let me go, I am only six.
But no, we had to wrestle – such is our destiny. The angrier you became, the more obscure seemed the numbers. Mother hovered nervously around the gas stove, and the young household help in charge of the crying baby sister disappeared into the sole bedroom. You sat in the chair next to me, lit a cigarette, put your hands to your forehead and pulled your hair in frustration. I was supposed to have memorized the tables but it was not working. The pink and green pages started to float in the film of tears clouding my eyes. But the tears could not drop. Nothing infuriated you more than girls who cried. I got it wrong. I got it wrong again. You hit me. The tears dropped. Your anger soared.
I am trying, I am trying my best, but I still don’t get it. I look up and the cigarette in your fingers is moving towards me. Smouldering red. You press its glowing tip hard into my skin. Tears cascade, my tongue grapples with the tables again, and fails again. The cigarette descends, again, then again.
(My mother knows I am writing about her husband. She sends me a text message, urging me to write about his philanthropic self, the self that he most nurtured and cherished. She reminds me of the charity events he organized, the many blood donations he made, the orphanage and old age home where he volunteered, all the people he reached out to when they were in need. He wanted to be great, she says, and reminds me to share my father’s positive qualities.
I am trying, Amma. I am trying.
And in order to tell one slice of the story, his and mine, with as much integrity as I can muster, I have had to put my mother in parenthesis, much as she has been most of my life.)
An astrologer predicted three skirmishes with death for the young man. Whether he would survive or not depended on the antidote, and this happened to be the horoscope of the woman who would soon be his wife. In rapid succession, there occurred three events the family attributed to the prediction – a cobra bit him when he was strolling through a park but a timely anti-venom saved him, he was in a road accident but escaped with a mild injury, and then there was the car crash. The car crash episode was the bedrock of the life-story mansion that my father kept constructing before our eyes. I am tempted to surmise that all his meditations on and longing for death go back to this incident.
The young man, who will later father us, is travelling from one coastal town to another. He could have taken the bus as usual, but he is in a hurry and decides to hop into one of those shared taxis hovering on the edges of the bus stand. Including the driver, there are six people crammed into the car, and the young man sits next to the driver. But a fellow traveller begs him to swap seats and he obliges, moving to the back seat, and off they go on their journey.
The car meets with an accident. Its metal frame is completely mangled (he once claimed he had been slammed all the way back into the trunk of the car, but knowing my father’s love of exaggeration that may or may not have happened). A passing acquaintance pulls him out of the debris and rushes him to a hospital. He is alive and there are injuries to remind him of the event. The man who swapped seats with him has been smashed to death.
I think my father turned that scenario around in his head many times. It was a seat he did not want to give up but he did oblige this man, and perhaps in doing so he also gave the other man his death. Is that why he revisited that moment endlessly?
This way of thinking about it helps me understand why this man, who always craved an early demise, wanted to live when doctors informed us that his liver was damaged, that his end could be unpredictably close. The appointment he kept wanting and making with his death was not the same as the actual disintegration. The blood vessels that were bursting in his throat, in his stomach, were nothing like the death that had been fantasized about, and the lure of living was in being able to continue to imagine.
Following that car accident, my father, barely twenty-five years old, would lie to the police and stubbornly refuse to admit he had been in the car. His wounds, he told a suspicious cop, came from a fall. His excuse to us (for the lie) was that he did not want to be summoned to court to give witness. His marriage was just a few weeks away, and he had had a terrible experience with courts and cops the previous time he had been a witness in an accident case, the one that killed a little girl.
There were two bloodied images of my father that literally coloured my imaginings of him in my childhood. The first was him lying in the trunk of a smashed-up car, alive and breathing, so that he could go on to live and have a wife and children.
The second image was of him running through unlit streets holding a bleeding, dying child in his hands, trying to get to the nearest hospital as soon as possible. The child had been hit by a truck that was reversing and the driver had not seen the girl as she darted across the road to run an errand for her father late in the night. This was something I had to do all the time for my father, so it was easy to think that could have been me. My father was watching when the truck hit the little girl. He picked up the girl and tried to get a ride to the hospital. None of the auto rickshaw drivers wanted to get involved in a ‘police case’ and soon he was running through the streets with this child bleeding into his shirt, his skin. She would die before he got to the hospital.
He was called to court several times during that trial. The truck drive
r would beg my father to tell the truth – the child hurried into the unlit street without warning and the driver did not want to go to jail for a mistake he could not avoid. The father of the dead girl would cajole our father to say otherwise – he was miserably poor and needed the compensation money. I don’t know how the trial ended, because that part of the story interested our storyteller the least – he was invested in the theatrical and traumatic part (him running through the streets with a dying child) and he wanted to talk about the moral dilemma of bearing witness (to decide to tell the truth was easier than deciding what truth and whose truth).
We were certain we would never have any accident story to match his and listened in awe. Those were the days when we had to walk to school (in Bangalore) – my sister and I, both of us with satchels on our backs and a tomato-red plastic basket in our hands that contained our water bottles and lunch boxes.
There was an iridescence to the morning light that day which colours my remembrance each time, or maybe I have had to recollect this event so many times that the scene has acquired a quality of burnished gold. The ambience has been the only toehold to stay with the episode because the moment of action took place in a twinkling of the eye. A racing bus took a sharp curve at an intersection we had just crossed. The bus was heading straight at us. There were two more children of the neighbourhood with us and instinctively we all moved away from the road. Only my sister was a step behind. Her lunch basket slipped from her grasp and she turned to pick it up. It all took place so quickly, my hand grabbing her and the bus whizzing past us, leaving behind crushed plastic. My sister burst into tears. She had just lost her favourite water bottle – it was shaped like a rocket – and such possessions were rare and truly prized in our world then. It was a rather shaken and sombre group of girls that made their way to school.
One did not look forward to the evening. The demolition of the plastic basket had to be explained to parents. Those days our father flew off the handle at the lightest provocation. Those days I had seen him slap my mother as if she were no different from us. Those days there was a crazed, desperate side to him and we walked around it on tiptoes. First the event was explained to our mother who, like us, worried about telling our father about it. A new basket and lunch box and water bottle would have to be budgeted for and bought. I waited like a convict for a verdict, my nose buried in a book, as she told him what happened.
He called out to me. That familiar way of roaring my name. And then that familiar churning in the stomach as one awaited punishment.
He was holding out his right hand. I was confused. It was not raised to strike. All the fingers pointed at me as if inviting me and I reciprocated with my own hand. He shook it solemnly. I was befuddled, embarrassed.
Thank you, he said.
The lunchbox …
We will get a new one. You saved your sister’s life today. I am proud of you.
I do not think of myself as a lifesaver in that story, not then nor now. But his expression of pride at something I did was a significant moment, and it was different from his pride of me as a miniature version of his ideal self. I wish of course that difference had been clear to me while I was growing up, but it was not.
Those years in Bangalore, from fourth grade to seventh grade, are not easy to recollect or write about, even though they contain the happiest nooks of childhood: learning to ride the neighbour’s bicycle and then cycling in the sun for hours on rented bicycles, getting a membership card at the local Circulating Library and speed-reading my way through stacks and shelves of books, collecting stamps, learning to whistle, listening to old Hindi film songs on the cassette player with my father, singing on stage for the first time, starting a secret club à la Enid Blyton with the girls next door, watching regular shows on the neighbour’s television, discovering I too could write poems and stories. The world was bursting with enticing possibilities.
And yet, mostly, in the cavities of my mind, those years stretch out endlessly, perilously. The bright spots are pushed to the sidelines. Something was going horribly wrong with my little life, and there was nobody I could tell.
I was doing poorly at school – this was around sixth grade – and even though I sat in the front row of my class, my eyes glazed past the teacher, I was unable to pay attention. Daydreaming, said the note from school, but that was not it. Maths felt like carnage, and the marks card, with low numbers inked in red, sat in my satchel, not shown to the parents till the teachers sent word through my sister. Our father thundered, but that had ceased to matter beyond the immediate pain and fear.
My handwriting was the most eloquent witness to those days of turmoil. It changed almost every other day. The pen would sit on the page and not know what direction to take, then turn into grotesque squiggles. As a child who found asylum in words, this would remain the most frightening and shameful experience – all hidden fault lines exposed.
This was also true about standing on the balcony, very late in the night, alone, face turned to the stars. I had started sleepwalking.
In my waking hours, I loitered, hung around the neighbouring houses and tried to delay coming home. One evening I stayed on at a friend’s house without notice, as late as I could, and came home to such beatings that for months I felt unable to step out of the room, not even to the toilet, without telling my parents. There had a bright, relatively outgoing child before this, and now there was someone nervous and withdrawn.
One could read these as classic signs and behaviour patterns of an abused child, which was the case, but they went unread.
My father’s cousin was staying with us, sleeping in the spare bedroom, an adult man who had a job in a bank. My father and his cousin had grown up in the same house, called each other brothers. I was ten, and quite comfortable sleeping alone on a cot in the living room. One evening – I remember it frame by frame – my father told me to go and sleep in the bedroom with his cousin. He said I would be more comfortable there.
This was a mistake.
The churnings in my father’s world at this time were palpable to all of us. His promotions had been delayed. Work was deeply repulsive, unsatisfying, stressful. Underserving peers were getting rewarded and his sincerity was being exploited, he said. He was operating on a short fuse. There were fights about some money that belonged to my mother but had been mismanaged or spent by my father. Their arguments, her deep hurt, his face darker than a mushroom cloud, his way of coping with everything by berating his fate, and when frustration crossed the frontiers of language, by swinging his arms.
That cramping of words – it was my lot too. The greedy gobbling of books had given me a vocabulary, but nobody had told me about the experience, about what bodies can do to each other. There were no words for this. The predator of my nights was appointed (by my father) as my maths tutor during the day. Numbers became grimmer. I was sent on an overnight bus journey with the man, a sleepless night of such mauling that getting on a bus again felt unthinkable. I could barely function, or I malfunctioned, and that just meant more beatings at home. There was not an inch of stable footing in the cosmos.
In the bedroom, the oil lamps in the prayer alcove lit up the walls late into the night, till the oil or the wick ran out. Then came confusing greyness, odd smells, breathing skin. Inch by inch, night after night, biding time, for the invasion, the pain, the pain.
The words turned up, months later in school, explained by an old nun conducting yet another routine sex education class, while girls giggled into their palms and I sat at the far end by a window, my mouth dry, my heart frozen with terror. It was the most horrifying moment I had known till then. This made babies, I was told, but I had not yet had my first periods, and for the next couple of years, I was haunted by the idea that there was a dead baby stuck inside me. At eleven, the shame and confusion of it all turned my tongue to glue.
(Tell him, tell him what happened to you, my sister would urge me when our father was alive. I had told her in my late twenties, anxious to know if she had
to endure something similar. No, she said, to my utmost relief. I also wanted her to know that the innards of my childhood were nothing like its external appearance. But in that moment, what she felt was directed towards our father.
Tell him.
I can’t. It would completely shatter him. What purpose will it serve now? He won’t believe me, he will say stupid things I don’t want to hear. It is the past, it has taken me many years and a lot of work to cope with the trauma. It is best to say nothing, just let it be, let it be …)
I was sutured to my secret. It was soon time for another transfer, for our father’s job rarely kept us in a city for more than three or four years. First he was sent to Lucknow, and then to Delhi. But since we were in the middle of school term in Bangalore, he left to live on his own for a year, till we could join him. His cousin moved out of our house too.
With the men gone, the walls of our house seemed to cool down, draw apart. Like saplings cleared to breathe air and light, we sprung back that year, thrived somewhat in the sole care of our mother.
Then something happened to our father in the distant city. We joined him at the end of the year, but whatever he had been resisting had finally claimed him, and the spiral had begun. An icicle of sadness had started to dribble and puddle in me too. This was when G had thought about escaping but never made it past the steps of the building. This was when I turned thirteen, and my father grandly announced that he would not hit me any more, for I was now a teenager. There were a few occasional knocks on the head in the next couple of years, but the days of thumping and whipping were over. We were now hemmed in by rum-soaked evenings.
It was not just the regular drinking, with me, his daughter, made the keeper of the bottles, or the way he recoiled from the demands of parenthood, but the way the anguish radiated from his entire body, sometimes taking the form of intense chills, the dragging feet and bent back that returned very late from work, the surges of anger (one day he emptied my entire writing table out into the streets), the way he bit his lips and groaned that he could not bear it. It is not my place to diagnose a dead man, and back then (I was perhaps in the ninth grade) there was no name for the chronic torment we witnessed. But now I know.
If I Had to Tell It Again Page 6